Hanging in the office of long-serving Greens chief of staff Ben Oquist is a framed poster for the February 19, 1996, edition of Business Review Weekly. ''The Green Menace'' it proclaims in bold type.

At the time, the federal election that swept John Howard to power was only weeks away but BRW was focused more on the Tasmanian Bob Brown, also a shoo-in to enter Federal Parliament at that election, and his ''extreme policies''.

Sixteen years on, and little has changed other than the Greens now have nine senators, one federal MP and an entrenched primary vote of between 12-14 per cent, largely at the expense of Labor.

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Labor is battling to win back the progressive voters it has lost to the Greens, while simultaneously trying to win back from the Coalition the blue-collar voters who left because of Labor's power-sharing arrangement with the Greens amid perceptions, so successfully fuelled by Tony Abbott, that the tail is wagging the dog.

The trigger for the latest onslaught against the Greens was a July 4 newspaper column by the NSW member for Hunter, Joel Fitzgibbon, arguing the government was at risk of permanently losing voters to the Greens unless it rethought its strategy of coalition with it. Fitzgibbon is old-school Labor, as are most of his constituents.

''Labor's base vote has been effectively split for a long time between what I would call the traditional blue-collar base and the more progressive base you will typically find around the capital cities, and the Greens are exploiting this,'' he said.

The ''extreme policies'' of the Greens were scaring away the former and ''stealing'' the latter and there was a perception ''that we are being pulled by the nose by the Greens''.

Fitzgibbon, who sees the carbon price anger among the blue-collar workers, has long been steaming about the Greens.

It is not a new concept. Tensions erupted in late May last year when Julia Gillard out of nowhere used the annual Whitlam lecture to excoriate the Greens for not valuing work or family. A week earlier, she had labelled the Greens extreme. Brown called the clumsy attempt at product differentiation ''unfortunate, unwarranted and gratuitous'' but cut Gillard some slack because she was new to the job.

Fitzgibbon was moved to print after the Greens refused to help the government out of the toxic political bind concerning asylum seekers. This is despite Labor haemorrhaging over the carbon tax, which the electorate sees as a Greens policy forced on the government. ''What is our headline policy, whether we like it or not, it's carbon,'' said one MP who agrees with Fitzgibbon. ''The punters aren't stupid.''

Fitzgibbon believes the Greens should no longer be automatically entitled to Labor preferences, at a state or federal level.

This view was adopted by Fitzgibbon's NSW Right colleagues and today, at the state ALP conference, the general-secretary, Sam Dastyari, will move ''that NSW Labor should not provide the Greens Party with automatic preferential treatment in any future preference negotiations''.

This does not mean Labor would automatically put the Greens last, just that officials such as Dastyari will have leverage when negotiating with the Greens before the next federal election and beyond.

But wars are easier to start than stop and the move has sparked a round of spleen venting against the Greens, again exposed the internal differences in Labor and given grist to those who believe Gillard is to blame for a bad deal with the Greens.

The Left, in NSW and beyond, was suspicious this was a ploy by the NSW Right to shift Labor to the right. The rhetoric about the Greens being more extreme than One Nation had progressives up in arms.

For every blue-collar voter Fitzgibbon may win back, inner city MPs such as Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek risked losing more left voters to the Greens.

''This does damage Albo because his progressives see us as attacking what they stand for,'' the MP said.

The NSW Left MP Laurie Ferguson described the Right's tactic as ''a fairly clumsy, late-in-the-day effort to indicate that we have differences with the Greens''.

Policy, not denigration, was the way to win back the progressive voters, he said.

Not all the Left was upset. Penny Wong, who was climate change minister when the Greens rejected the first emissions trading scheme in 2009, unloaded in a speech on Monday night, which she had prepared before Dastyari opened the floodgates.

Wong argued that the purist stance was a key reason why the government and a price on carbon are in such a perilous situation.

The NSW Left powerbroker and senator Doug Cameron, who has compromised on asylum seeker policy for the sake of the government, rejects the Greens as idealists of the all-care, no-responsibility variety.

The Left will support today's motion but only after securing significant word changes that reaffirm Labor is as much a party of the Left as it is the Right. The motion, obtained by the Herald, has a long preamble acknowledging Labor's social achievements and also notes how the Greens refused to preference Labor ahead of One Nation at the last NSW election.

The Greens issued an open ticket preferencing no one.

The navel gazing has also thrown into sharp focus next Saturday's state byelection for the Victorian seat of Melbourne, which has been held by Labor for more than a century.

With the Greens a strong chance to win, some in the Victorian Left are livid at the timing, saying the attacks on the Greens could only hurt Labor. And, state election or not, there will be no shortage of critics ready to draw links to Gillard's leadership, should Labor founder. Including those who leaked internal polling showing federal Labor's unpopularity was proving to be a significant factor in the byelection.

Correction: The original version of this story incorrectly said the Greens gave preferences to One Nation ahead of Labor at the last state election.

THE DEAL UNRAVELS

August 21, 2010: Hung parliament elected.

September 1, 2010: Labor and Greens sign deal in which Greens guarantee supply and confidence in return for policy commitments. Including multi-party committee to develop carbon price policy.

July 7, 2012: NSW Labor general-secretary Sam Dastyari proposes preferencing the Greens last. Backed by Paul Howes. Dissent within Labor over relationship with Greens. Gillard points to her speech of a year ago.